Free Republic

New York City's socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has spent much of his brief political career being treated by the national media as some kind of irresistible force, a fresh-faced wunderkind whose progressive appeal stretches far beyond the activist left and into mainstream America. He's the future, they tell us. [Insert needle scratch noise.]There's just one not-so-tiny problem with that narrative: Americans don't actually like him very much. A new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll lays it all out in black and white. As RedState's Nick Arama reported Wednesday, there was some good news in that poll Republicans heading into the midterm elections....

Tenant complaints have surged 25% this year compared to last year in New York City, .. socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s twisted war to squeeze landlords — and seize private property — is escalating. ... The city put us in a situation where they’re just slowly beating us to death and blaming us,” said Lincoln Eccles, who owns a 15-unit building in Crown Heights. “The apparatus of the government is geared to squeeze us.” ... All of this tenant organizing is part of a long term project to take wealth away from people and redistribute it,” said Stu Smith, an investigative...

New York Democrats have driven one of the state’s major donors into the arms of Republicans... billionaire James Dolan, owner of the NBA champion New York Knicks, has spearheaded an effort to pour millions of dollars into Republican Bruce Blakeman’s gubernatorial campaign. In 2022, Dolan backed Blakeman’s opponent, Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul. Now, in conjunction with his company and with family members, Dolan has given so much money to pro-Blakeman committees and super PACs that he stands as New York state’s single largest GOP donor. New York Conservative Party Chair Jerry Kassar offered one explanation for the billionaire’s apparent shift....

Arab Islamic "palestine" terrorist Ahlam Tamimi, then 20 years old, disguised herself and Izz al-Din Shuheil al-Masri, the suicide bomber, as Jewish tourists. She chose the target for al-Masri and left the area before the bomb detonated and went to report on the bombing on a Palestinian news channel where she was a part-time journalist. Ahlam Tamimi who helped choose the target, scouting the location to decide when the crowd would be largest, the death count highest, and then dropped off the bomber. She later smiled as she recalled celebrating as the death toll rose from 3 to over a...

What do New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Alexander Soros—George Soros’s son and heir—have in common? A shared ideological inspiration: Slavoj Žižek, the self-proclaimed “left-fascist” who seeks the West’s bloody destruction. This should chill every American. Zizek has been described as “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.” His agenda is summed up in his publisher’s description of his 2008 book, In Defense of Lost Causes: “Žižek argues the case for revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The “lost causes” he wants to revive and succeed are those of the Bolsheviks, Mao Tse-tung, and Robespierre. The Iranian...

A nonprofit funded by far-left billionaire kingmaker George Soros is trying to silence a surging movement to keep NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani from attending the 25th-anniversary memorial for victims of the 9/11 attacks at Ground Zero. September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows put out a statement on Tuesday that sharply contrasted with the views expressed by many other 9/11 victims’ families. It all but accused the Change.org petition of targeting Mamdani because he’s the city’s first Muslim mayor. “We strongly condemn the anti-American accusations and Islamophobic sentiment underlying the effort seeking to prevent him from being at Ground Zero,” said...

A Muslim organization has bought a former Catholic seminary on Long Island with plans to establish a boys’ boarding school. Local residents have objected to the proposal as it moves through the planning process A former Catholic seminary on Long Island has been sold to a Muslim organisation that plans to reopen it as a religious boarding school for Muslim boys. The United American Muslim Association, based in Clifton, New Jersey, has purchased the three-storey, 70,000-square-foot building and its 14.6-acre grounds at 26 South Saxon Avenue in Bay Shore for $5.2 million. The property, currently zoned for residential use, sits...

With shark sightings on the rise along much of the Northeast coast this summer, the New York Police Department (NYPD) is using drones to patrol city beaches, giving lifeguards an aerial view to spot sharks before they get too close to swimmers. The NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) uses drones for a wide range of public safety missions — from rescuing distressed swimmers and assisting search-and-rescue operations to monitoring crowded beaches and tracking sharks offshore. Working alongside lifeguards, officers in the specialized, high-tech unit patrol the skies above city beaches, providing a precautionary aerial line of defense against the...

Empire State lawmakers have moved to criminalize digital blueprints used to 3D-print firearm parts and the printers that can read them as part of a gun-control package that also targeted popular Glock pistols. Governor Kathy Hochul (D.) signed the measure into law on Wednesday as part of the state’s budget bill. It sets up a ban on the sale of 3D printers that aren’t equipped with yet-to-be-developed software or hardware that blocks the printing of firearms frames or receivers, unless the buyer has state and federal firearms industry licenses. It bans the distribution or sale of digital gun design files...

We went undercover inside smoke shops and bodegas across New York City to answer a simple question: Would retailers accept taxpayer-funded EBT benefits to pay for alcohol or drugs? Store after store attempted to process EBT cards for kratom, a psychoactive substance that is not eligible for purchase with SNAP or EBT benefits. One clerk attempted to process the purchase as “EBT Cash.” Another processed it as “EBT Food”, treating kratom as if it were groceries. Federal law 7 CFR 278 and 7 U.S.C 2012 prohibits retailers from accepting SNAP or EBT benefits for non-food items, including drugs, alcohol, and...

No one will be shocked to learn that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's pied-a-terre tax is more expansive than he let on. Mamdani said the tax only applied to wealthy people who owned secondary homes in the Big Apple that are worth more than $5 million. But if you read the actual tax, that $5 million value only applied to one-, two-, and three-family homes. Condos and co-op units that are secondary homes are also taxed, and starting at a value of $1 million, or more. That explains why there are 31,000 properties subject to the tax. HOLDUP. Zohran’s...

Zohran Mamdani called it an affordability win, but New Yorkers ordering takeout paid for it. At a Wednesday press conference, the New York City mayor touted a city report showing delivery workers collected an additional $104 million in tips over six months. Customers supplied every dollar. Mamdani credited city rules that require apps to show a tip option before checkout, including a selectable 10 percent tip. He also claimed Uber Eats and DoorDash hid their tip buttons and set default tips below 10 percent, causing delivery-worker tips to fall 79 percent. Then he took credit for forcing the companies to...

New York City business leaders aren’t inclined to go to war with Zohran Mamdani – but his latest stunt surrounding the controversial pied-à-terre tax is forcing them to reconsider, On The Money has learned. This week, our Marxist mayor released the names of taxpayers who are being subjected to his idiotic levy on owners of apartments worth $5 million or more that are not their primary residences. It’s idiotic partly because these wealthy out-of-state residents don’t use our services, but nevertheless already pay plenty of state and city taxes – the lion’s share in fact. They might decide to buy...

Mayor Mamdani with fanfare released a list of 960,000 owners of real estate in New York City that have been determined they could owe the pied a terre tax because NYC computers have determined they own what was billed as a market value of $5 million or more. Now there are only about 1 million residential tax lots in New York City so the first question is how did virtually every owner get put on the list?The answer is that you are subject to the tax in the first two years if your property has a “DOF valuation” of over...

Zohran, Tribune of the People, has at last unveiled his plan for government-owned grocery stores. The mountain has labored, and here is your mouse. At first glance, it appears to be a display program, something that will enable Mamdani to claim that he carried out his campaign promise without putting himself at political risk. Five stores scattered across the same number of boroughs, each with over a million inhabitants, is not very impressive. But whatever number -- five, five hundred, or five thousand -- the scheme suffers from a crippling flaw that has been overlooked. Ya see, New Yawk is...

Last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s short stint as a faux president ended with an embarrassing acknowledgment that he could not, as promised during his campaign, arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. So, this week, Mamdani the Grocer made a reappearance, with details on the five city-run grocery stores that he will open. But rather than deliver discount groceries, Mamdani is selling New Yorkers a bill of goods that will cost them millions. What Mamdani described was a discount food bank dressed up as a grocery. Standing in front of blackboards saying “REDUCED 30%,” Mamdani sounded like a bodega hawker: “Once...

When Mayor Zohran Mamdani last week unveiled the 18-person committee that will advise him on his judicial nominations, he said the committee reflected the city it served. But to some observers, something seemed off. Though Jews make up an estimated 10 percent of the New York City population and represent such a significant share of New York City lawyers that the Jewish lawyer has become a cultural stereotype, the mayor’s 18-person committee seemed to have no Jews on it. On Monday, Elizabeth Forspan, the president of the Brandeis Association of Queens, a group of Jewish legal professionals, sent a letter...

When Mayor Zohran Mamdani named the 18 members of his Advisory Committee on the Judiciary on July 22, he said "the committee will help ensure that our judicial system reflects the city it serves." Mamdani's chief legal counsel, Ramzi Kassem, said the new appointees to the committee offered "a truly representative cross-section" of the city's legal profession. But a coalition of the city's Jewish bar associations demanded Monday that the mayor fix what they said is an apparent failure to appoint a single Jewish member to the panel that is responsible for choosing judges in New York City.

Longtime New Yorkers fume after being hit with massive pied-à-terre tax bills: ‘Is this a witch hunt?’ New Yorkers were seething Tuesday after Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration alerted them they’d be on the hook for the state’s new pied-à-terre tax — which was explicitly sold as a levy targeting wealthy owners of luxury second homes. Longtime residents — some who have called the Big Apple home for decades and own a single abode in the city — told The Post they were shocked to get hit with five-figure tax bills they believe were mistakenly mailed out, and are now being...

A prominent election-integrity activist has uncovered bombshell evidence suggesting that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 election victory may not have been legitimate. Marly Hornik, the founder of RealAmerica.Vote and NY Citizens Audit, has suggested that the 2025 election included large numbers of unqualified or nonexistent voters. But that’s only part of the problem. “I actually don’t know whether Mamdani won the mayoral race, and I’m not here to say that he didn’t,” Hornik said ... The problem we uncovered is that the New York City and the New York State Boards of Elections have no idea if Mamdani...